One other important point claims our attention in the process of
education of man’s genius. We must immunize our children against mental
microbes, as we vaccinate our babies against small-pox. _The cultivation
of critical judgment and the knowledge of evil are two powerful
constituents that form the antitoxin for the neutralization of the
virulent toxins produced by mental microbes._ At the same time we should
not neglect proper conditions of mental hygiene. We should not people
the child’s mind with ghost-stories, with absurd beliefs in the
supernatural, and with articles of creed charged with brimstone and
pitch from the bowels of hell. _We must guard the child against all evil
fears, superstitions, prejudices and credulity._
We should counteract the baneful influences of the pathogenic,
pestiferous, mental microbes which now infest our social air, since the
child, not having yet formed the antitoxin of critical judgment and
knowledge of evil, has not the power of resisting mental infection, and
is thus very susceptible to mental contagion on account of his extreme
suggestibility. The cultivation of credulity, the absence of critical
judgment and of recognition of evil, with consequent increase of
suggestibility, make man an easy prey to all kinds of social delusions,
mental epidemics, religious crazes, financial manias, and political
plagues, which have been the baleful pest of aggregate humanity in all
ages.
The immunization of children, the development of resistance to mental
germs whether moral, immoral or religious, can only be effected by the
medical man with a psychological and psychopathological training. Just
as science, philosophy and art have gradually passed out of the control
of the priest, so now we find that the control of mental and moral life
is gradually passing away from under the influence of the church into
the hands of the medical psychopathologist.
The physical life of the nation is now gradually being regulated by
medical science with a consequent decrease of disease and mortality.
Gradually and slowly the school begins to feel the need of medical
advice, both as to the health of the pupils and their more efficient
training. Gradually the medical man assumes the responsibility of
guiding the teacher and telling him why the pupils are defective in
their studies and why the pedantic methods of academic pedagogy are arid
and sterile. In some cases the doctor actually undertakes the training
of the young. Thus the Italian doctor, Maria Montessori, from the
education of defective children has finally undertaken, with immense,
almost phenomenal, success, the training and education of normal
children.
As we look forward into the future we begin to see that the school is
coming under the control of the medical man. The medical man free from
superstitions and prejudices, possessed of the science of mind and body,
is to assume in the future the supervision of the education of the
nation.
The schoolmaster and the schoolma’am with their narrow-minded, pedantic
pseudogogics are gradually losing prestige and passing away, while the
medical man alone is able to cope with the serious threatening danger of
national mental degeneration. Just as the medical profession now saves
the nation from physical degeneration and works for the physical
regeneration of the body-politic, so will the medical profession of the
future assume the duty of saving the nation from mental and moral
decline, from degeneration into a people of fear-possessed, mind-racked
psychopathies and neurotics, with broken wills and crushed
individualities on the one hand, accompanied, on the other hand, by the
still worse affliction and incurable malady of a self-contented
mediocrity and a hopeless, Chinese philistinism.
There are in the United States about two hundred thousand insane, while
the victims of psychopathic, mental maladies may be counted by the
millions. Insanity can be greatly alleviated, but much, if not all, of
that psychopathic mental misery known as functional mental disease is
entirely preventable. It is the result of our pitiful, wretched,
brain-starving, mind-crippling methods of education.